CASSETTE: A Documentary Film about the Cassette Tape

To coincide with Flack’s recent post about The Boombox Project, I thought I should bring to your attention a new documentary called Cassette: A Documentary Film about the Cassette Tape.

The filmmaker’s are currently running a Kickstarter campaign to get funding for the documentary. They have prepared a teaser trailer of sorts that can be viewed on the Kickstarter page. It’s been a long time since I’ve used cassettes but growing up they were my heart & soul (metaphorically speaking, I never actually owned Sports by Huey Lewis & the News).

Also check out the Kickstarter campaign for Rewind This! which is a documentary about VHS & VHS culture. For full disclosure, I’ll admit that I have backed the campaign for Rewind This! I am not a backer for the Cassette documentary though.

President of the Mr. Belvedere fan club. Creator of the Cult Pop Cult newsletter: a weekly email of bizarre and funny links for people interested in retro pop culture. Join the cult at: http://cultpopcult.com

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3 thoughts on “CASSETTE: A Documentary Film about the Cassette Tape”

Drahkensays:

I remember getting my first tape player & tapes. It was either my 8th or 9th Bday, I got a 2nd hand tape player/recorder (one of those ones with both the door & speaker on top, that you laid on the desk/table), an AC-DC tape (for those about to rock), and a kenny rogers tape. A few months later I also got a couple care bears tapes (some of those care bears songs still run through my head at times, even all these years later).

Got my first tape recorder in 2nd grade (1972) – it was a Panasonic Take-N-Tape – a red rounded plastic housing with a simple tape transport and a condenser mic built into the machine. Two memories of this machine was bringing it to school (where a friend of mine took great joy in recording himself cursing and using profanity) and the other was making a comedy radio show with a fellow named Joe Sena (from Queens, NY if you know him) during a night when my parents were having a party and his parents (and he) came over.

This was not enough. I fell in love with music, but wanted to play songs I liked when I liked and where I liked. Since they had not yet invented to iPod, I had to rely on tapes. In the early days, I had an old transistor radio which I would hold up to the mic and make mixed tapes of songs on the radio. These tapes took quite a bit of editing, because you never knew when a particular song would come on the radio. My older sister then got a portable AM-FM cassette player (similar to the one show above) and these tapes could be made WITHOUT AMBIENT BACK GROUND NOISE! EUREKA! This was probably 1975 or 1976.

I discovered this one Saturday when she was out and I had nothing to do. I put on WNBC 66 in New York and started taping songs. This was my best tape ever! I no longer have this tape, but I’ll never forget it. It was around 1977 or 1978 (when STAR WARS came out) that I was really hankering for a machine like my sister’s. I had to wait a few more years.

In 1981, I bought a JVC RC M60JW at 47th Street Photo for $229.00 plus tax – it represented about a month’s worth of summer take-home pay that year.

Around the same time (maybe around 1980), my Dad had bought a component stereo for the family – INCLUDING A TECHNICS STEREO CASSETTE DECK. This meant that I could borrow albums from friends and record them to tape. This was a turning point.